The present invention relates to voice-activated dialing, and more particularly to ascertaining an area code during voice-activated dialing.
Both rotary and touch-tone dialing rely on telephone numbers to initiate desired telephone connections. Telephone companies use the numbers to route calls, but people now depend on the numbers for all telephone communications. This is somewhat unnatural because people generally select those with whom they would like to talk by name or other convention. Indeed, telephone directories are arranged by name, not number.
Some companies started to develop voice-activated dialing systems to replace touch-tone dialing. In such systems, telephone users speak the name of an individual or destination into the microphone of a telephone handset to initiate a telephone call. Voice activated dialing, or voice-dialing, thus allows connection to be made directly, avoiding the step of looking up names to locate corresponding telephone numbers.
Examples of experimental voice-dialing systems appear in L. R. Rabiner, J. G. Wilpon, and A. E. Rosenberg, xe2x80x9cA voice-controlled, repertory-dialer system,xe2x80x9d Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 59, No. 7 (September, 1980), and U.S. Pat. No. 4,348,550 to Pirz et al. These systems have limited accuracy and speed and cost a great deal of money. Recent advances in speech recognition have improved performance dramatically, particularly for systems that are not trained to a particular speaker that have, until recently, performed worse than systems trained to particular speakers. In addition, the increasing computational and memory capacity and decreasing cost of computing hardware improve the commercial viability for simpler applications of speech recognition such as voice-dialing.
Limitations on the performance of voice-dialing systems, however, still significantly reduce their commercial applicability. For example, difficulty arises when an area code is not known for a particular party to be called. This can lead to problems in establishing the appropriate connection, especially if the area code is inferred incorrectly. There is thus a need for a technique of correctly inferring an area code associated with a party to be called during a voice-dialing session.
A system, method and computer program product are provided for determining an area code during voice activated dialing. Initially, utterances are received from the user during a session via a speech recognition portal. Such utterances are indicative of a third party. A speech recognition process is then performed on the utterances to interpret the utterances. A phone number is then identified based on the utterances. It is then determined whether the phone number includes an area code. If it is determined that the phone number does not include an area code, the area code is inferred. The inferred area code may then be outputted to the user. The user is then prompted to confirm the inferred area code. The phone number is then dialed with the inferred area code upon the receipt of confirmation from the user.
In one embodiment, a log-in process is initiated. Such log-in process may include collecting a caller identifier. Further, the user may be identified in a database utilizing the caller identifier. It is then determined if the user can be identified in the database based on the caller identifier. If so, a user identifier may then be identified in the database based on the caller identifier.
The log-in process may further include prompting the user to enter a user identifier upon it being determined that the user can not be identified in the database based on the caller identifier.
With the caller identifier and the user identifier collected, an address book associated with the user may be retrieved based on the user identifier. It is then determined whether the utterances indicative of the third party are representative of a name of the third party. If so, the phone number associated with the name may then be looked up in the address book. In the alternative, it may be determined that the utterances indicative of the third party are representative of a phone number of the third party.
In any case, it is then ascertained whether the phone number includes 10-digits. If so, the phone number may simply be dialed.
If, however, the phone number includes 7-digits, it is determined whether the caller identifier is valid. If so, an area code of the phone number is inferred from the caller identifier. If not, the area code is inferred from the user identifier. It should be noted that the user identifier includes a phone number of the user.